Superman director James Gunn has shared a new promotional photo from the film that is aimed at getting DC fans hyped for its July release. The new promo image shows actor David Corenswet’s Superman standing in the snow; all we can see are his red boots, a bit of his blue leggings, and a corner of his cape flapping in the wind. Gunn captioned the image by revealing that this is more than a new Superman teaser image – it’s an anniversary milestone.
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“One year ago today. Longyearbyen, Svalbard. Faster than a speeding bullet toward July 11, 2025. #Superman,” Gunn wrote.
Longyearbyen is indeed a municipality of Svalbard, Norway, and is the location that Gunn used as the backdrop for Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. It seems that Gunn, Corenswet, and the rest of the Superman production crew were standing in that frigid spot exactly a year ago – or as close to that anniversary as we can get. Cameras officially started rolling on Superman on February 29, 2024, which just so happened to be a Leap Year, as well as Superman’s canonical birthday in DC Comics lore. So, while we’d have to wait four years for the next official anniversary of rolling cameras on Superman, February 28th works just as well.
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The fruits of Gunn’s labors out there in the snow last year have certainly paid off this year. The Superman teaser trailer became a record-setting debut for DC Studios and Warner Bros.; the most extensive stretches of footage from that teaser were scenes of Corenswet’s Superman bloodied and battered and crashing into the snow, with only his super-dog Krypto within earshot to hear Clark Kent/Kal-El whistle for help and rescue. A subsequent Superman TV spot upped that ante, showing a fully healthy and happy Superman flying through that arctic region. Is this new teaser image actually teasing the joyous snowy flight sequence? That would be the kind of cool Easter egg that James Gunn loves to drop.
It can’t be understated just how much is riding on Superman at this point. Gunn and his fellow DC Studios head Peter Safran held an event this past week, updating select press (and a few friendly “influencers”) on what the larger plans for the DC Universe franchise are, going forward. While it was orchestrated and hosted smartly enough, it was impossible not to notice that the event also revealed some considerable early pull-back from the original slate that Gunn and Safran presented early in 2024. That includes The Authority – a project directly connected to Superman and the original speculated to be a direct “next chapter” step of the DCU saga – now being “back-burnered.” Reading between the lines, it currently feels like Superman is landing in a “wait and see” place with the studio, before other major plans for the DCU slate move forward.
To that end, Gunn will likely be ramping up a major marketing push for Superman leading up to its release, and images like the one above are an easy way to keep fans invested and expand the hype sphere, without the massive cost of traditional marketing. All those Gunn AMA sessions and chat thread responses have been leading to this moment. Time for takeoff.
Superman has a release date of Juy 11th.
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Image Credit: Star Trek
